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(ii) Number of houses in respect of which an undertaking was
accepted under sub-section (2) of section 19 of the Housing Act,
1930 Nil.
Particulars concerning Inspection of Tenement Houses are given in Table 6 on page 107.
The 318 houses and flats mentioned at the beginning of this Section as having been
erected during the year comprised the following:—
40 flats built by the Borough Council (22 in Camden Road, 18 in Somers Town);
52 flats erected by the London County Council on their Ossulston Estate; and 36 flats
built by the St. Pancras House Improvement Society, Ltd. (St. Francis Flats' in Bridgewater
Street); 166 flats by the Commissioners of Crown Lands (Datehet House in Augustus Street
and Ascot House in Redbill Street).
HOUSING CONDITIONS.
With the exception of a number of blocks of self-contained flats, the greater part
of the working-class accommodation in the Borough consists of tenement houses, and the
drawbacks associated with this form of housing are well known. Most of these houses are
old, and, owing to age and the rough usage associated with numerous tenants, frequent
inspections and the service of many notices are required to keep them in anything like
suitable condition.
Although the majority of the tenement houses have been occupied as such for many
years, the number is steadily increasing, as year by year there are streets in which the houses,
previously occupied by one family, are now being let to a number of families. The factors
mainly responsible being the age of the houses in question, the cost of upkeep the inconvenience
of so many stairs, and the migration of many of those able to afford it to the
outlying suburbs.
The type of tenement house usually found in the Borough is a rather large singlefronted
terrace house, generally of three or four storeys, but also having a more or less
underground basement. Each floor usually has two rooms, one in front, the other at the
back, and although there are many single room tenements, as a rule each floor of two rooms
is occupied by one family.
In a number of instances there are tenements consisting of three or four rooms, but in
such cases the accommodation is necessarily spread over more than one floor.
As the majority of the tenement houses in St. Pancras are fairly large, it follows that
the average number of families per house is exceptionally high.
This view is confirmed by the information obtained at the recent Census (1931), and
an interesting table is included in the Special Appendix on page 112, which gives the
average size of occupied dwellings, the average number of families per house and the average
number of persons per room for each of the metropolitan boroughs.
It will be seen that housing pressure, as measured by the proportion of families to
dwellings, is higher in St. Pancras than in any other metropolitan borough. There are on the
average 2.28 families to each dwelling, and only 18.4 per cent. of the families in St. Pancras
are in undivided occupation of separate dwellings.